What to do with old website still online & duplicate content
-
I launched a new wordpress site at www.cheaptubes.com in Sept. I haven't taken the old one down yet, it is still at http://65.61.43.25/ The reason I left it up is I wanted to make sure everything was properly redirected 1st. Some pages and images are still ranking but most point to the new site. When I search for carbon nanotubes pricelist and look in images I see some of our images on the old site are still ranking there https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://65.61.43.25/images/single-walled-nanotubes.1.gif&imgrefurl=http://65.61.43.25/ohfunctionalizedcnts.htm&h=359&w=451&tbnid=HKlL84A_9X0jGM:&docid=N2wdCg7rSQBsjM&ei=-A2qVqThL4WxeKCyjdAM&tbm=isch&ved=0ahUKEwikvcWdxczKAhWFGB4KHSBZA8oQMwhJKCIwIg
I guess I can put WP on the old server and do some 301s from there but I'm not sure if that is best or if I should just kill it off entirely? My rankings took a hit on Nov 15th and business has been bad ever since so I'm trying to figure this out quickly.
Moz.com and onpage.org both say my site has duplicate content on several pages. I've looked at the content and it isn't duplicate. How can I figure this out? Google likely see's it the same way. These aren't duplicate pages, they are different products. I even searched my product pages to make sure I didn't have 2 of each in there and I don't. With Moz its mostly product tags it sees as duplicate but the products are completely different
-
Thanks Dirk - I only wanted to keep it short term. As long as all link juice is passed to new site then I can just kill it off. I wanted to redirect specific pages because the new sites page names are different. That would be the only reason to install WP, to facilitate redirects. The old site is so old it is done in frontpage so there is no htaccess file. I see you did find a piece of dup content but the errors have been there for months. I just changed that page name last week and apparently didn't 301 it. I think the strange url you found might be part of the problem, perhaps they are just bad relative links. I will try screaming frog. Thank you for your help.
-
I do understand that you want to keep a copy of your old site - but don't really understand why you allow this site to be indexed by Google? (robots.txt allows full indexing).
The reason you kept it seems a bit off - redirects are made on domainnames. So keeping the site accessible under the IP address will not help you to check if the redirects are properly working.
Why would you need to install Wordpress on the old server - redirects are made in the htacess file. Absolutely no need to do this via Wordpress. Check here or just google it (if you also changed the url's the redirect links might be more complicated than the example behind the link).
Duplicate content - not too difficult to spot:
Examples:
https://www.cheaptubes.com/product-category/industrial-carbon-nanotubes-products/conductive-nanotubes-composite-additive/
https://www.cheaptubes.com/product-category/industrial-grade-carbon-nanotubes/conductive-nanotubes-composite-additive/seem quite similar to me.
Some pages are also a bit strange - check this url
https://www.cheaptubes.com/product-category/functionalized-carbon-nanotubes/www.cheaptubes.com/product-category/functionalized-carbon-nanotubes/fluorine-functionalized-carbon-nanotubes/ - link is coming from https://www.cheaptubes.com/product-category/functionalized-carbon-nanotubes/ - I guess caused by a wrong formatted relative link.
Try running Screaming Frog to check these issues - it's an incredible tool to help you with issues like this.
Edit: you use canonicals on the strange url's above so they shouldn't really count as duplicates
Dirk
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate content
I have one client with two domains, identical products to appear on both domains. How should I handle this?
Technical SEO | | Hazel_Key0 -
Duplicate Content from Wordpress Template
Hi Wondering if anyone can help, my site has flagged up with duplicate content on almost every page, i think this is because the person who set up the site created a lot of template pages which are using the same code but have slightly different features on. How would I go about resolving this? Would I need to recode every template page they have created?
Technical SEO | | Alix_SEO0 -
Old Content Pages
Hello we run a large sports website. Since 2009 we have been doing game previews for most games every day for all the major sports..IE NFL, CFB, NBA, MLB etc.. Most of these previews generate traffic for 1-2 days leading up to or day of the event. After that there is minimal if any traffic and over the years almost nothing to the old previews. If you do a search for any of these each time the same matchup happens Google will update its rankings and filter out any old matchups/previews with new ones. So our question is what would you do with all this old content? Is it worth just keeping? Google Indexes a majority of it? Should we prune some of the old articles? The other option we thought of and its not really practical is to create event pages where we reuse a post each time the teams meet but if there was some sort of benefit we could do it.
Technical SEO | | dueces0 -
Duplicate content problem
Hi, i work in joomla and my site is www.in2town.co.uk I have been looking at moz tools and it is showing i have over 600 pages of duplicate content. The problem is shown below and i am not sure how to solve this, any help would be great, | Benidorm News http://www.in2town.co.uk/benidorm-news/Page-2 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-102 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-103 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-104 9 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-106 28 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-11 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-112 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-114 45 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-115 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-116 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-12 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-120 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-123 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-13 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-130 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-131 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-132 31 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-140 4 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-141 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-21 10 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-22 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-23 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-26 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-271 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-274 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-277 50 21 2 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-28 50 21 2 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-29 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-310 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-341 21 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-342 4 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-343 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-345 1 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-346 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-348 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-349 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-350 50 16 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-351 50 19 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-82 24 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town 50 20 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-10 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-100 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-101 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-105 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-107 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-108 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-109 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-110 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-111 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-113 |
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Duplicate Content of Reseller Product?
There is a particular product/service that I resell through an API. There are quite a few of them and each one requires a lot of content. The company provides web content for each product but I'm wondering about the SEO implications of using it? Obviously using the content, it will not be unique so I won't be able to rank (easily at least) for these products. Are there any _negative_results that I can get from using this content though? If I simply won't rank for those products it's not an issue since I get traffic elsewhere. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | reliabox0 -
Duplicate content issue with trailing / ?
Hi ,I did a SEOmoz Crawl Test and found most pages show twice, for example: A: www.website.com/index.php/dog/walk B: www.website.com/index.php/dog/walk/ I've checked Google Analytics and 90% of organic search traffic arrives on the URLs with the trailing slash (B). Question 1: Can I assume I've a duplicate content problem? Question 2: Is it best to do 301 redirects from the 'non trailing slash' pages to the 'trailing slash pages'? Question 3: For some reason every web page has a '/index.php' in it (see A&B) above. No idea why. Should it be a SEO concern? Kind regards and thank you in advance Nigel
Technical SEO | | Richard5550 -
Client has 3 websites, for various locations & duplicate content is a big issue...Is my solution the best?
Hi guys, I have a client who has 3 websites all for different locations in the same state in Australia. Obviously this is not the best practice but in the meeting he said that each area is quite particular about where they do business. What he means is that people from one area want to do business with a website from that particular area. He has 3 domains and we have duplicate content issues. We are solving these at the moment with the canonical tag however they are redesigning the site soon. My suggestion is that we have 1 domain and sub domains for the other 2 areas. This way the people from that area will see the company is from their area. Also this way we have 1 domain to optimise and build domain authority for. Has anyone else come across this and is my solution the best for this? Thanks! Jon
Technical SEO | | Jon_bangonline0 -
Similar Content vs Duplicate Content
We have articles written for how to setup pop3 and imap. The topics are technically different but the settings within those are very similar and thus the inital content was similar. SEOMoz reports these pages as duplicate content. It's not optimal for our users to have them merged into one page. What is the best way to handle similar content, while not getting tagged for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | Izoox0